When I was looking for National Park images, I came across the shocking pictures above. I hadn’t grasped how intensively the species was hunted in the nineteenth century, but according to the Nature Conservancy, by the early twentieth century, “less than 100 free-roaming bison remained in the world,” when once millions of these creatures, the largest land mammals on the North American continent, could be found coast to coast. Conservation efforts prevented the extinction of the species, and numbers have increased, but the American Prairie Foundation notes that because of cross breeding with cattle, “of the 500,000 bison alive today, fewer than 7,000 are non-hybridized.” It considers the species “ecologically extinct.”

The Plains Indians hunted the buffalo (while buffalo is probably the more widely used word, technically, the species is Bison bison, and so some prefer to call them bison), but the differences between them and the newcomers to the hunt are significant. One big difference: guns. And Indians generally — but not always — as Shepard Kreech explains in “Buffalo Tales: The Near-Extermination of the American Bison” on a National Humanities Center webpage, used every part of their prey they could, unlike the settlers who killed herds to sell their hides on to distant traders.

Kreech begins his overview of the role of the buffalo in the Plains Indians lives by noting that they ate

an incredible variety of bison parts: meat, fat, organs, testicles, nose gristle, nipples, blood, milk, marrow, fetus.But the buffalo represented more than food. For many it provided over one hundred specific items of material culture. Day or night, Plains Indians could not ever have been out of sight, touch, or smell of some buffalo product. It was the era’s Wal-Mart.

Distributing buffalo hides, ca. 1936. ARC Identifier 285666 The creator of this picture is listed in the bibliographic record as Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Rosebud Agency. The Rosebud Reservation, part of the Sioux Nation, is in South Dakota.

Hides with and without fur on were used for clothing, moccasins, bedding, and tipi covers. Other parts and their uses included:

Hair: ropes, stuffing, yarn

Sinew: thread, bowstrings, snowshoe webbing

Horns: arr ow points, bow parts, ladles & spoons cups, containers

Brains: to soften skins

Fat: paint base

Dung: fuel, to polish stone

Teeth: ornaments

Paunch & Large Intestine: containers

Penis: glue

Compare this to the meaningless slaughter of buffalo from trains:

”]

Illus. in: Harper’s Weekly, v. 2 (1867), p. 792. [LC-cph 3b08935]

or the hunter interested in the securing the largest numbers of hides he could: